by S. W. Perry
She’s not conventionally beautiful in the English style perhaps. You couldn’t lose her amongst a throng of rosy cheeks, flaxen curls and freckles. Rather, her skin has the smooth olive sheen of a Spaniard or an Italian. She has a strong, gamine face that narrows to a defiant chin. It could be stern, if it wasn’t for the generous mouth and the astonishingly brilliant amber eyes. Her hair is a rich ebony, burnished by a foreign sun. It flows back in unruly waves from a high forehead. And though his interest may be merely academic, his senses cannot be completely indifferent to the way the green brocade kirtle she wears flatters those straight shoulders and that slender waist. He notes, too, the narrow wrists and slender fingers – not at all like the village girls from Barnthorpe. The word that springs into his mind is ‘exotic’. An exotic flower, blooming in the wasteland that is his recent memory.
‘You’re awake,’ she observes dispassionately in a faint accent he can’t quite place. ‘I image you must be hungry. Can you manage a little breakfast? There’s larded pullet. We have some baked sprats left over, too. I’ll have my maid Rose lay out a trencher downstairs.’
‘How long have I been’ – he looks down, casting an uncomprehending eye over the unfamiliar nightshirt – ‘like this?’
‘Two weeks. At first we really thought we’d lost you. I’m glad we didn’t.’
When he doesn’t answer, she turns to leave.
‘Forgive me, I don’t even know who you are,’ he calls after her, feeling suddenly very foolish and only too conscious of the unkempt state he’s in.
She looks back and bestows a bright smile on him. ‘I’m Mistress Merton. Seeing as how I’ve been nursing you like a sickly babe, you may as well call me Bianca.’
He chooses the baked sprats. Then the larded pullet. Then some manchet bread, hot from the oven. His long fight against the river has left him ravenous.
He’s sitting in the taproom of the Jackdaw tavern. He knows it’s the Jackdaw because through the rain-streaked window he can see the painted sign hanging over the lane. A tail of water cascades from one corner, splashing onto the churned-up mud and horse-dung below. He observes his distorted reflection in the little lozenges of glass. It is not a good sight. He looks like a man who’s survived the pestilence – just.
A tankard of small-beer sits before him on the table, set down a moment ago with a smile by Rose, a full-bodied lass with a head of unruly curls. Not so long ago he would have emptied it in a moment, cursed the world, its maker and everyone in it and angrily demanded another. Now he just turns the tankard slowly, inspecting it. On his face flickers a sad half-smile that hints at remorse, or perhaps self-loathing.
He remembers something that happened to him when he was a boy. He’d been walking down a Suffolk lane, leading his grandfather’s old gelding punch, Hotspur. The horse was the largest and strongest on the farm, but as passive and biddable as a blind old hearth-dog. Nicholas had been leading him by the halter when, foolishly, he’d managed to put his right foot directly under one of Hotspur’s descending hooves. The pain had been beyond anything he’d known. ‘Hotspur, whoa! Whoa!’ he’d yelled. True to his nature, the horse had obeyed. Stationary, Hotspur’s entire weight began to bear down on Nicholas’s pinned boot. ‘Whoa!’ he’d yelled again, the tears springing into his eyes. ‘Whoa!’
And just when he’d thought every bone in his foot was about to be ground into dust, his grandfather had said softly, ‘When you’ve ’ad enough, my lad, just you tell old ’Spur to giddy-up.’
Sometimes, he thinks, we can be the agent of our own pain.
He pushes the tankard away.
At Nonsuch, Kat Vaesy has come to celebrate All Souls’ with John and Lizzy. She’s come alone, save for a single groom, contemptuous of the cut-purses who sometimes prey upon travellers on the London road. When she arrived yesterday afternoon, her cheeks flushed from the ride from Vauxhall, John and Lizzy had met her at the outer gatehouse. Taking John’s hand, she’d dismounted and greeted him with a respectful ‘my lord’. Protocol satisfied, she’d hugged him, kissed his cheek and cried, ‘Oh, John, it does my heart good to see you again! And you, Lizzy! And little Nug!’
The spaniel had raced around the courtyard, yelping ecstatically, until Gabriel Quigley, John’s secretary, had been forced to scoop it up and return it to Lizzy’s waiting arms.
This morning the two women stand together in the empty royal apartments and peer through the windows at the Italian gardens, waiting for the rain to lift so they can walk up to the pretty grove of Diana the huntress and let Nug chase pheasants.
They are much alike, Kat Vaesy and Lizzy Lumley: of a similar age, married to men a good deal older, both unable to bear children… and yet so utterly different.
Lizzy had once considered Kat a rival. When she’d wed John Lumley, the friendship between her new husband and the anatomist’s banished wife had been so close she’d felt shut out. She’d even wondered if Kat wasn’t John’s mistress. It had taken some time for him to convince her that the unbreakable bond they shared was one of grief. For Kat Vaesy and John’s first wife – Jane FitzAlan – had been the closest of friends, sisters almost. Even so, the knowledge hadn’t done much to blunt the other thorn on the bloom: the knowledge that Jane FitzAlan’s ghost would always be a constant reminder to Lizzy of her own limitations.
Raised by her father, the Earl of Arundel, on the extraordinary premise that a woman’s intellect is in every respect the equal of a man’s, Jane FitzAlan had won renown as a scholar in her own right. She’d even translated books by Euripides into English. No wonder John had loved her so, thinks Lizzy. She often imagines Jane standing by the Nonsuch library shelves, understanding effortlessly the contents of whatever volume she plucks from the shelves. Jane would never have had to ask Gabriel Quigley what they mean – as Lizzy sometimes does. Jane would never have feared appearing foolish in John’s eyes. Late wives, she thinks, can cast such dreadfully long shadows.
‘You have no notion of how good it is to be here again,’ Kat says, lifting a finger to trace the rain running down the leaded windowpane. ‘Sometimes I miss Nonsuch dreadfully.’
‘You should stay – join the household. It would make John happy.’ Lizzy laughs. ‘It would make me even happier.’
‘I can’t, Lizzy.’
‘Why not? Cold Oak is a pleasant enough house, but I know how much it pains you when Fulke comes.’
‘That’s where the problem lies, Lizzy. Fulke would never allow it. And I have no means of my own.’
‘You wouldn’t need means.’
‘Oh, Lizzy, we both know John wouldn’t be content unless he was maintaining me in the manner of a grand lady – and he’s already got one of those!’
‘But you’d be so welcome.’
‘I’d be a burden on his purse, that’s what I’d be. Besides, Fulke would accuse me of trying to turn John against him.’ Kat takes her fingertip from the glass and studies it, as if she expects her skin to have absorbed the rain outside. ‘Thank you, but no. Cold Oak suits me fine.’
‘John told me Fulke was vile to you, as usual, when Baronsdale and the others came down to plan the Accession Day banquet,’ Lizzy says, petting Nug as he begins to whine.
Kat grins. ‘You know me, Lizzy: I gave as good as I took. You should have seen Baronsdale’s face, when I asked him how long it would be before the College would allow a woman to practise physic. You’d have thought I’d suggested he make Lucifer a senior fellow.’
‘I envy you, Kat, I really do – having the courage to make those boring old men squirm in their ruffs,’ says Lizzy, the spectre of Jane FitzAlan tapping her on the shoulder once again. ‘I’d give anything to have the knowledge that John has, to be able to discuss physic with him on equal terms. But it’s just not the way God has made things, is it? At least, it’s not the way He made me.’
‘Look, the rain’s easing,’ says Kat. ‘And Nug’s weary of listening to women’s chatter.’
The bell at St Mary Overie has just rung
nine. The Jackdaw is almost empty, save for a pair of strong-armed wherrymen taking a late breakfast, and a fellow with a bald pate and a rash on his thin neck, who sits on his own, staring mournfully into his smallbeer. Nicholas reckons he’s a chapter-clerk from the Bishop of Winchester’s palace across the way. He’s probably wondering how he’ll explain to his dean the painful irritation that heralds a dose of the French gout. Not for nothing does Southwark call its whores ‘Winchester geese’. Mercury – administered by catheter, or burned over a flame and inhaled. The remedy pops into Nicholas’s head unbidden. But what use is such knowledge to him now? What does Nicholas Shelby know about anything, other than how not to drown?
‘How did you find me?’ he asks Bianca Merton a while later.
‘It was Timothy, our tap-boy. He went down to the river one morning with the slops and found you lying on the shore. He said you looked like a drowned bear, like one of those poor creatures they bait in the bear-garden.’
He assumes she wants an explanation. He can’t give one – not yet. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t pay you,’ he says, knowing few along the river will save you out of pure compassion. ‘I have nothing.’
She shrugs. ‘Then that’s exactly what you owe me. You’ve taken barely a bowl of broth every other day – and you purged most of that.’
‘There’s not much I can remember—’
‘I don’t doubt it. There’s not many who go into the river around here and come out alive. You were racked with the ague, even yesterday morning. I thought a syrup of lobelia might help. It did – a little. Not enough, though. So I gave you theriac. A few drops, and a day later… well, here we are.’
She smiles warmly. It’s a broad, open smile – not the eyes-lowered, modest twitch of the mouth that a tavern-mistress would usually give a physician. Then he remembers that a physician is probably the last person on earth he resembles. ‘Theriac? Are you an apothecary, then?’
Those intense amber eyes hold his for a moment, challenging him. If circumstances were different, he thinks, they’re the sort of eyes that might entice a man into any number of betrayals.
‘Does that tell you I’m an apothecary?’ she asks wryly, glancing towards the window and the wooden sign hanging beyond. It still shows a painted jackdaw. There’s not a unicorn’s horn – the apothecary’s traditional sign – anywhere in sight. ‘How could I be such a thing, when the Grocers’ Guild refuses to admit a woman to the trade? No, Mr Shelby, I am a tavern-mistress, plain and simple.’
He’s more aware now of the slight accent in her voice, though her English is faultless, gentle even. At rest, her upper lip is downturned slightly at the corners, which gives her mouth an impatient set. Her jaw is given to sudden tensions that come without warning when she speaks. What causes these sudden hardenings of the expression? he wonders. What do they hide?
He can think of a score of questions he should ask her. Simple ones like: why did you choose to administer mercy to a total stranger? Or, why did you not call a constable and have this half-drowned vagabond taken to the Bridewell prison? But what he really wants to ask Bianca Merton, the owner of the Jackdaw tavern who says she’s no apothecary – and is clearly neither plain nor simple – is how she got her hands on theriac?
To make it properly, it is said you need ingredients bordering on the magical. It’s also the most expensive physic money can buy.
In an empty byre that still stinks of its former occupants, Elise shelters from the rain and tries not to remember. But now that Ralph is no longer with her, memory is her only companion. And memory can cling tighter than Ralph’s little fingers ever did.
In her mind, it is once again early summer. They have spent five days in the angel’s house. Elise thinks it is as close to heaven as you can get without actually being dead.
Out of the blue, the angel comes to her with news that she and Ralph are to leave. ‘Please, not to Bankside,’ Elise begs, while Ralph sinks his fingers into her like the monkey she’d seen clinging to its trainer at the Bermondsey fair. ‘If we can’t stay here, we wish only to go to Cuddington – to the great house my mother was always telling me about, the one with the goose-down bed and mutton to eat every day. Otherwise, we would rather die.’
If Cuddington is where you’ll be happy, then that is where we’re going, the angel replies kindly.
Why did I not take up Ralphie and flee again before it was too late? Elise asks herself, as the guilty tears stream down her cheek and the wind whines through the gaps in the wall of the byre. She knows the answer now: the angel was working her magic upon her, making her compliant, bending Elise to her will. And that night she must have used a particularly potent magic, because after supper Elise found herself so confused that if the angel had told her she was going to Greenwich, where the queen had personally asked to see her, she would have believed it and gone like a lamb.
This new place had turned out to be as dark and noisome as the stew she’d run away from. But somehow by then she had lost all ability to think and act for herself. She had strange, vivid dreams, even in the daylight. Often, she could not tell when she was dreaming and when she was awake. Again, now, she knows that was the angel’s magic at work.
But there had been one sliver of hope before the descent into terror: Elise had discovered that she and Ralph were not alone. There were others here in this new place, others the angel had rescued.
Other victims trapped in the angel’s cage.
9
Stay for a while,’ Bianca suggests. ‘I could use the help.’ Finding a man who can haul casks and labour in the brewhouse – which Nicholas finds ever easier as his strength recovers – and can also read and write is a tall order south of the river. She’s glad when he accepts.
She already suspects that the man she and Timothy fished from the river is no run-of-the-mill vagrant. He’s educated. She knows this because, in his delirium, she’d heard him curse God – in Latin.
She thinks perhaps he’s a fallen priest, though as he fills out again, he looks more like a sturdy yeoman’s son than a man of God. But then how many farmers’ boys have a churchman’s Latin? Still, she does not pry. In the two years she’s lived on Bankside, she’s learned that many who come here do not wish to be the people they once were. Besides, his presence helps keep Rose’s eyes off the better-looking customers.
As for Nicholas, where else does he have to go?
Not back to his old life. That’s gone for ever. To Suffolk, then? Back to his family, back to brother Jack and his sister-in-law Faith, adoring parents to a hearty new acorn? No, he couldn’t stand the pity. Or the constant reminder of what he’s lost.
He thinks perhaps when the spring comes he’ll head for the Low Countries again, re-enlist in the army of the Prince of Orange, go back to patching up wounds and strapping shattered bones. You don’t even need to be a physician for that. They’re desperate enough in their fight against the Spanish to take a monkey, if it could learn the right tricks.
So, while he waits for the season, Nicholas retains his place in the attic. The little window becomes his spyhole to the past. He closes it when the sounds of the slaughtering in the Mutton Lane shambles become too intrusive. But when it’s open, and the air is clear enough, he can just make out the spire of Trinity church across the river. He imagines Eleanor sitting there alone, waiting for him to join her on his way home from administering to some jumped-up alderman’s self-induced dyspepsia. But when he slides onto the pew beside her, he discovers she is someone else entirely.
On most days the Jackdaw heaves with dice-players, coney-catchers, purse-cleavers and every other sort of hard-drinking, loud-throated sharp-trick you can put a name to. They sup raucously from leather bottle and tankard until their cheeks bloom. They play primero and hazard, the cards and the dice going down between the laden trenchers while young Timothy, the tap-boy, strums his cittern and sings sorrowful songs in a high voice about slain lovers and broken hearts. Sometimes Nicholas wants to tear the instrument from his fi
ngers and throw it into the fire.
He dines in a corner of the taproom on pottage and maslin bread. Bianca joins him when she can. They develop an easy friendship, though he senses in her, too, an unspoken wariness that prevents anything deeper. Some pains are too expensively purchased to be traded carelessly, he thinks.
Bianca Merton.
Why does the name seem oddly familiar to him? For several days now he’s racked his memory. But it’s too brim-full of pain to see to the bottom clearly. It takes a while for the tiny nugget of recollection to float clear. Even then, it seems to have come from someone else’s memory, for it is surely a different Nicholas Shelby struggling to stay awake after the feast at the Guildhall on Knightrider Street, while he listens to President Baronsdale fulminating against the tricksters and fraudsters who practise illegal physic: Imagine it: a woman! A common Bankside tavern-mistress by the name of Merton. They say she concocts diverse unlicensed remedies, without any learning whatsoever!
A broad smile creases his face as he imagines Baronsdale learning the truth. And smiling seems just as much of a new experience as all the others he’s encountered recently.
Yet still Bianca does not volunteer where she got the theriac from.
He likes the simple tasks she sets him. They require no thought. Thought leads him inevitably to the darker places.
He realizes life cannot be easy for an unmarried maid trying her best to carve out a place for herself on Bankside. He’s noticed how her temper flares when she thinks some would-be gallant is paying her attention solely because he finds appealing the idea of a wife who could bring a profitable tavern to a marriage. But how to learn a little more about Bianca Merton, without it sounding like an interrogation?
She solves the dilemma for him. Over a late bowl of pottage one evening she lets slip that she’s been in England barely two years. ‘From Padua,’ she tells him when he gently probes further. She places her hands either side of her face, sets the thumbs at her jaw, then pushes the fingers back along the crown, running them through her hair as if she’s clearing the deck for action. ‘My father was an English merchant there,’ she tells him.
